Collaboro: a collaborative (meta) modeling tool

Abstract

Software development is becoming more and more collaborative, emphasizing the role of end-users in the development process to make sure the final product will satisfy customer needs. This is especially relevant when developing Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which are modeling languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSML is developed, their participation in the DSML specification process is still rather limited nowadays. In this paper, we propose a more community-aware language development process by enabling the active participation of all community members (both developers and end-users) from the very beginning. Our proposal, called Collaboro, is based on a DSML itself enabling the representation of change proposals during the language design and the discussion (and trace back) of possible solutions, comments and decisions arisen during the collaboration. Collaboro also incorporates a metric-based recommender system to help community members to define high-quality notations for the DSMLs. We also show how Collaboro can be used at the model-level to facilitate the collaborative specification of software models. Tool support is available both as an Eclipse plug-in a web-based solution.